There exists a need to rapidly and inexpensively drill holes through earth in vertical, slanted and horizontal positions. Oil wells are now drilled vertically or nearly so, usually with a slow rotary drill. Water wells are drilled vertically with either a hammer type impact drill or a rotary drill, usually in a vertical position. Usually ditching machines are used to dig the ditches, for laying pipe, burying cables and installing fiber optic cables. This invention is for drilling an oil well and uses an expendable electromagnetically accelerated drilling projectile or drill head to drill a hole by hyper velocity impact. The nearest prior art we find is my pending patent application for a High Speed Electromagnetically Accelerated Earth Drill, Ser. No. 07/491,276, filed Mar. 9, 1990, now U.S. Pat No. 4,997,047. However, this invention differs significantly in necessary mechanical structure.
We visualize that drilling an oil well would be started in the usual way and some twelve hundred feet of twenty-four inch diameter casing would be set. The electromagnetically accelerated impact oil well drilling equipment or drilling gun would then be hoisted into place in the derrick and aligned accurately to shoot an ice filled thin plastic projectile down through the casing at hyper velocity. In the approximately seventy-five foot long drilling gun the missile should attain a velocity of over 15,000 feet/second and our calculations indicate that this would penetrate over 50 to 100 feet of concrete, shale, soft rock or normally compacted sand. A special well effluent diverter is activated in a nanosecond after the drilling missile enters the casing. This is necessary to divert well effluent away from the interior of the drilling gun.